Re: request to ban 'no source' contributions
[Some parts snipped]
> And so, I as a programmer may want to protect my intelectual
> property because I don't trust the law to be a strong enough deterent.
> Do I expect my software to never be hacked/cloned or otherwise violated?
If the modified binary is beneficial, why complain?
If it harms, then the wrongdoings themselves are to cause prosecution and
liability claims against the wrongdoers.
Otherwise who cares?
In a nutshell, there are problems as you state, but closed source generates
problems of its own and does not alleviate what it supposedly helps preventing.
> No, but I know that at least I have not made it easy.
If the software is largely useful, the notion of intellectual property itself
is questionable, because things are produced to be used first; their being
sold is kind of collateral damage.
If it is just that nobody had thought to get a patent on something already
known, then the notion is downright illegitimate.
Otherwise, the whole point of protecting the software appears barely relevant.
>>Binding is a
>>> slap in the face of programmers at large, that's all. Another Eu
>>> misfeature...
>
>
> If I bind my program, there is now only a handful of
> files I have to distribute, so it is much easier to distribute.
Did you hear about self-extracting archives? They solve this handy...
> If I
> bind my program, I know that someone can not accidentally open one of my
> files in notepad and break the app and then come wining to me that the
> app is broken.
Either there's an installer, and it's now common practice for it to repair an
installation. If there's none, reextracting from archive cures it all.
> I may also choose to bind so that a part of the bound app
> is not distributed as open source. This could be for a variety of reasons,
> I may be protecting the intelectual rights of another programmer who
> granted me permission to use his routines, but not the right to distro
> his source.
As often happens, it's just that a questionable practice comes to rescue
another one.
> I may have put in a file in the bound app that is not available
> in source so that I can tell if a bound app was bound by me, or by
> someone with the source. Beleive it or not, that last saved me in
> another programming environment where my customer decided to modify my
> program, compile it and then get me to troubleshoot the problems they
> created.
Wow! A small utility to compare files was not enough? It should, as long as
there is some official release. And a commercial product needs to have a
factual definition to qualify as such. Just compare and see. Checksums, or any
flavor of it, are good protection too, even when exposed, because fooling a
few of them simultaneously is a lot of work.
I'm not against distributing binaries, but not without some access to sources.
There may be NDAs on such accesses for example.
> They even went so far as to alter the date and time on the
> compiled code to be the same as what I distro'd. It wasn't until I invoked
> an "easter egg" function which proved that the distro was not mine that
> the customer had to come clean that they had modified it and therefore I
> would get paid to troubleshoot it because the customer no longer had a leg
> to stand on that it was a bug in MY code.
The problem does exist, but the recipe applied is not a cure for that problem.
See above.
Regards
CChris
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